Dream of the Dragon

I love this. In a time when journalism is on its deathbed and simultaneously in its infancy on emerging medias, MoJo’s Twitter alerted me to this little watchdog wonder.

People generally get less analysis, they spend less time consuming information, partisanship and propaganda are rising almost as high as during the days of Yellow Journalism. To combat this decline in depth and understanding jobs are being lost and papers fold under the pressure of the internet. Everybody knows how strange these days are. But what I appreciate most about the evolution of the blogosphere is the heightened degree of accountability. A number of sources, not just ProPublica, drew attention to the questionable allegiance of a source in this NY Times article. Evidently the downplaying Gulf of Mexico Foundation gets something like a quarter of its funding from oil companies and related industries.

What’s just as cool as the alarm ProPublica set off is that the NY Times reporter and a rep from that foundation responded very quickly. The article was then updated to include the questioned parties defenses of their actions. How cool is that? One, called out for non-disclosure. Two, provided a forum to explain yourself. I love it.

Also, what good is it to diminish the scale of this disaster? If we blow it out of proportion and it mobilizes that much more manpower to solve the problem, who cares?